Bottles of the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine are shown inside the Beacon COVID-19 vaccine clinic at Elkhart General Hospital on Jan. 27 in Elkhart. South Bend Tribune Photo/ROBERT FRANKLIN/
The St. Joseph County Health Department had to scramble to come up with enough doses to keep its COVID-19 vaccination clinic open this week, after one weekly allotment from the state never arrived Feb. 12 while another was delayed until at least Monday because of weather.
Donations from other providers will allow the department’s vaccination clinic at St. Hedwig Memorial Center to stay open today. But it was still unclear Thursday whether more doses would arrive in time to run the clinic again Monday.
County officials said the state never sent the local health department a shipment of 2,500 doses of the Moderna vaccine that was supposed to arrive last week, apparently because Indiana hadn’t received its latest allocation from the federal government.
With fewer doses to go around, the state skipped last week’s shipments to some local health departments and prioritized federally recognized community health centers, such as Healthlinc, which focus on underserved people, St. Joseph County Deputy Health Officer Dr. Mark Fox said Thursday.
On Thursday morning, it was unclear whether the local health department would be able to run its vaccine clinic, at St. Hedwig, on Friday. But Fox said late Thursday afternoon that Healthlinc and Maple City Health Center, in Goshen, provided enough doses for the department to vaccinate its full slate of 500 people today.
Earlier in the week, the department relied on donated vaccine from Healthlinc and Saint Joseph Health System. If the state gets the shipment it’s still expecting, the clinic at St. Hedwig should be up and running Monday.
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